TravelMole Interview: Richard Copland, president, ASTA

Wednesday, 30 Oct, 2003 0

The health of travel agents these days is better than often believed, says Richard Copland, president and chief executive of the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA).

“The consumer media has this conception that travel agents are like an endangered species, but I tell them the travel agent today is alive and well and open for business,” he told TravelMole in an interview from Miami, where ASTA had its recent convention.

When Delta Airlines started eliminating agent commissions in 1995, he said, airline commissions represented 70% of agency business.

“But over the last eight years, agents have become business people. Airlines are now 30% of revenues, despite the internet and despite cuts,” he said.

Travel agents have discovered they need to charge fees to be profitable, he added.

As a result, Mr Copland said one third of agencies are profitable, another one third break even and about one third still don’t make money.

But he says the more business-minded ones have found alternative income streams such as selling cruise tickets.

“The cruise industry in 1995 did about $5 billion in business. They’ll probably do $18 billion this year. And 95% of that business is done by travel agents charging up to 18% commissions,” he said.

He admitted that the number of travel agencies has declined. There were 35,000 US agencies in 1995, down to today’s 23,000, But Mr Copland pointed out these were only the brick-and-mortar aspects of the business.

“That doesn’t account for the growing army of people who work at home or just on the internet,” he said.

Mr Copland is a harsh critic of both government and the airlines.

“One of our biggest issues is the government, which can’t figure out what they’re doing. Every couple of months, some homeland security or other government official says they don’t know when or where or how, but something is going to happen,” he said.

“Every time that happens, travel gets killed. The government needs more discretion,” he added.

Mr Copland is also critical of the US government propping up the airline industry with subsidies. He said: “We’d like to see a healthy air transportation system. The answer is not to give billions of dollars to the airlines over the past few years. That doesn’t help the situation. We need a more sustained approach.”